Capital2 bosses speak at HEC Paris

February 12th, Capital2 Solutions founder Sam Kirby gave a talk to the 2009 MBA class at  HEC Paris (France’s top business school). The subject was the Hiring Markets for 2009 / 2010 and the hour long presentation gave rise to some healthy questions and debate at the end of the talk.

Recruitment Market 2009

So how are things shaping up for 2009?

Well, there’s overwhelming consensus that hiring will slow down across the board. Profits are down, therefore budgets are down therefore hiring slows….. logical. Our core markets of banking and high technology are broad enough to enable us to react effectively to this, but we’d be stupid to think that next year will be easy.

How does this affect the way we work?

Well generally in tough economic periods, there are a lot of candidates on the market (redundancies etc), and fewer new jobs being created. The inverse is roughly true in boom times, where there are lots of jobs compared to the number of suitable candidates. This means we as a company have to do 3 main things:

1. We work harder to find new roles to fill, and try to keep tight hold of our existing (hiring) client base.
2. We have to ensure that the ratio between being asked to hire a role and actually filling it is as close as possible to perfection.
3. We need to maintain an accurate and large database of active candidates to ensure we react quickly in the event of being retained by a client. This can even take the form of partnerships with 3rd party researchers or RPO companies.

So we will be affected. We service the banking and technology markets, both of which will be squeezing suppliers (ie us) hard over 2009. That said, our management team have already come through one serious recession – no reason they can’t come out the other side of this one smiling too!!!!

Recession? The end of Free market capitalism? Run for the Hills!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Having blogged quite a bit earlier this year on the sub prime issues, we have stayed away from doing so purely because it has been impossible to keep up with the various banks collapsing, being taken over, nationalised etc. We also predicted the recession was part of a cycle… this has been proved to be an optimistic view.

At time of writing the US congress’ bailout bill has yet to be adopted (defeated when put to the vote), the european nations are burying their heads in the sand and the markets are in turmoil. So is it time to start stockpiling food and living in your cellar?

Well, no, not really. What the past few days have shown us is that governments do not actually subscribe to the ‘free market’ theory as so famously championed by Greenspan. When it comes to the crunch (and to vote losing economic hardship!) governments will intervene on the markets to prop up failing institutions. Is this right?

Well yes and no. Yes if ordinary consumers’ property and savings are in danger. No if the bank has speculated purely to accumulate wealth for itself. Call us old fashioned but we feel the purpose of a bank is to finance the economy, not to make themselves rich to the detriment of the rest of the economy. Some of the greed that has been exhibited has been quite astounding. But hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Where to now? We think the economic situation will not bottom out until the summer of 2009, and then will begin to show growth for the last quarter of the year. It will be a tough period for many, but if this means a return to the parsimonius and non debt-reliant outlook of previous generations then this can only be a healthy development.

Good luck everybody!

End of Q3, heading into Q4, expectations??

Summer is ending, and that means there are 4 months left till year end. September is all about tying up processes from the summer hiatus, and building for the end of the year.

Clients need to hire by end september if the want someone to start before the end of 08, candidates need to begin looking now if they want a new role for 09. All sorts of factors come into play as new budgets are thrashed out in companies across the world.

Our world (nice link there eh) looks OK. Our focus is the technology and especially enterprise software hiring and this area seems less affected than the other side of our business (banking) by the global downturn.. let’s hope this continues.

We are continuing to work with established players, start-ups and US firms looking to enter EMEA and we are on target to hit our first full year’s forecast…. hopefully with some healthy invoices to send to kick off 2009 well!

Keep updated on our job lists http://www.capital2solutions.com

Update on Capital2’s progress

So, here we are at the end of July 2008, and given our ambitious growth plans outlined in an earlier blog, it would seem a good idea to have a check as to how we are performing against expectation.

The company began trading in February 08, although the first few months involved more administrative work and preparation than actual hiring!! The French SARL came into being in April 08 and this is really when we were able to shut the door on the bureaucracy and focus more on our clients.

Since then we have sourced candidates for roles in: France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Germany and the UK. We have received job offers in Germany, Portugal, France, Spain and Italy…. not bad going considering!

These first few months have also been extremely useful in teaching us how to run a business, and we have extended our international network massively… 6 months in and we are much better prepared to take on executive search assignments and multiple job assignments anywhere in Europe. Our business is much more robust and better established.

Billing: Things are on track although we are behind out initial (ambitious) forecast… hopefully a strong second half to the year will get us back on track.

Growth: on track for 2009, nothing major planned for the rest of 2008, which is to be used to consolidate.

So things are looking positive, in a period of economic instability, we are performing to expectation. Our low overheads enable us to be flexible to meet the needs of various clients and the future is looking extremely positive.

www.capital2solutions.com

Typical! High tech sector next to suffer?

Well is the knock on effect of the credit crunch now starting to bite?? It seems like the knock on effect is that companies are scaling back on spending on the likes of IT and software.

According to Reuters:

BOSTON (Reuters) – U.S. technology companies have posted stronger quarterly profit growth than any sector except for oil, but investors fear that cracks are emerging as clients in troubled industries like finance, retail and construction reduce IT spending.

 

This week, business software maker VMware Inc (VMW.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) issued a revenue warning, and Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) CEO John Chambers said many of his customers see the economy picking up early next year rather than later this year.

 

Wall Street is bracing for more bad news over the next few weeks as tech companies release earnings forecasts with their second-quarter reports.

 

“We’re definitely concerned about the September quarter and how we are going to finish the year,” said Rich Parower, managing director at J&W Seligman, which has about $4 billion in technology stocks.

 

“The economy has only gotten tougher,” the fund manager said, adding that he expects a rash of third-quarter forecasts to fall short of analysts’ estimates.

 

The tech earnings season starts in earnest next week, with Intel Corp (INTC.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), IBM (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Google Inc (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) among the companies reporting results.

 

Analysts on average are looking for quarterly profit growth of about 47 percent from Microsoft, 39 percent from Intel, 35 percent from Google, and 14 percent from IBM, according to Reuters Estimates.

 

Overall, the 71 tech companies in the S&P 500 Index .SPX are forecast by Wall Street to report an average of 16 percent year-on-year profit growth for the second quarter, according to Thomson Reuters Proprietary Research.

Euro 2008 Well done Spain and what else is new?

With all the excitement of the football and the recently passed half year mark the blog has fallen by the wayside recently……….. sorry folks.

But well done Spain! For once the best team in the tournament actually won the tournament and all round we feel this is a great thing for International Football. Attacking creative footy won out against big brutes and defensive formations! Superb.

So what’s new here in the wonderful world of Capital2?? Not much to be honest, we’re still trying to fill various commercial roles in banking and software across Europe as well as trying to run and expand our business so we’re pretty busy.

H1 performance was light, but H2 is looking strong and if our forecasting and projections are correct we should be in good shape to continue to grow in 2009 – on croise les doigts.

Don’t forget to check out our website www.capital2solutions.com

New Look Website!

OK so it isn’t a massive change, but still…………………

1. The spinning musical brain has been taken off. Although we liked the concept, a lot of people on WANs or with limited memory PCs found it took a long time to load.
2. Improved search capability….. we were previously limited to 3 jobs per search…. not enough. You can now search our entire live job database worldwide.
3. Link to french version… our home page is in english, with a link through to the version française

Visit us and feel free to give us your comments: www.capital2solutions.com

Capital2 Solutions Locations – Paris

Champs Elysée

Paris office up and running……..

Well finally we have sorted our offices out in Paris and have opened the HQ of our french operation in the über-trendy 18th Arrondissement, Montmartre.

We are therefore within easy striking distance of La Défense and the 8th Arrondissement where the vast majority of our french clients are based, but we’re still able to situate ourselves in a building with ‘cachet’ and in an area in which we can put down roots i.e. not being based in 25m² of charmless business suites somewhere!

Next stop Germany on our way to global domination (cue maniacal laghter) mwa ha ha ha haaaaaaa!